


Mind your head.

by redundant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour, Fluff, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Pining, Teenagers, ice cream summer, we're just ignoring the war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-09 02:57:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20470673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/redundant
Summary: And it’s one of those strange afternoon moments where you’re watching someone talk and you notice their face, and the curve of their mouth, and the soft sharp shadows their eyelashes cast on their face, and their smile, and the liquid darkness of their hair, and the clear grey light of their eyes. And Remus— behind the counter, under the lights, spoons glinting around him, air cold and sweet— can’t stop looking. He smiles. He can’t help either one..fluff, ice cream, and two idiots in like-like.





	Mind your head.

It’s a beautiful day in London, not a cloud in the sky, which is, incidentally, bluer than— a blue thing. Remus is no poet, especially when he’s still recovering from the Knight Bus, leaning against the lamppost nearest the Leaky Cauldron and trying not to attract stares from the eleven o’clock Diagon Alley crowd. The sun’s shining like it’s getting paid. Coincidentally, so is Remus this summer. Five sickles an hour, ten hours a day, five days a week, yes he is. 

The bell above the shop tinkles, which is an unfortunate word but life’s like that, sometimes. Another unfortunate thing: his uniform, which Sirius Black drops into his arms, grinning like he’s never seen anything funnier.

“What,” Remus says.

“You have an apron,” Sirius says delightedly, as if he isn’t currently wearing one himself. And a black shirt tucked into a pair of jeans glorious in their Muggle-ness, and Docs. He actually doesn’t look awful. And his hair’s grown out a bit, flows to almost his shoulders—

Which. Remus frowns. “Shouldn’t you tie up your hair?”

“And why would I do that.”

“Food safety, perhaps. Hygiene. You know, things that should maybe be thought about when selling foodstuffs to paying customers.”

Sirius nods thoughtfully. “Interesting. I’ll consider it. Come on, Florean’s shitting himself waiting for you.”

“Now that sounds like a food safety violation,” Remus says, but walks in.

It’s bright inside, and cool. The floor’s cobblestone like outside, and the tables are glass. There are booths clustered near the windows, with bright purple cushions, and wicker chairs, and lights floating overhead. 

It takes a second for him to process what’s happening. Florean’s lower half is the only one visible: the rest of him is in some giant roaring metal contraption with gears and cogs.

“What the hell,” Remus says.

“Oh, he’s winning,” Sirius assures him. “He always does.”

“What is that thing?”

“I believe you’d call it the till,” Sirius says, in the tones of someone too high-class, up until recently, to have seen one himself.

Florean’s voice can be heard from inside, in muffled fragments. “Remus— Parlour— Sirius— ropes— help— fine— started—” And then it stops, and Florean’s in the machine.

“Are you sure this is—”

“He’s fine.”

And Florean emerges, rumpled and panting. “Hello Remus,” he says brightly. “How’ve you been? How’s your holidays? How’s the trip here? Good to have you on. Sirius’ll show you around. I’ll be in the office recovering.” And he strides to a door behind the counter and waves his wand over his shoulder at the towering monstrous metal thing, which keens and folds down into a more manageable-looking register. 

“He’ll be about an hour,” Sirius says.

“Oh,” Remus says.

“Get your apron on,” Sirius says, and then grins, slow and wicked. “You ready to be educated?”

“Um,” Remus says.

Remus is taken through the flavours one by one— everything from vanilla to The Bertie Botts Bean-stravaganza— and drops the used sticks into another jar where they vanish and reappear, cleaned and unsticky, into the first one. There are thirty-seven of them. Somewhere around flavour seventeen, Mint Imp Implosion, he stops registering actual flavours. His tongue is numb and cold and sweet. Sirius watches him carefully. “Get it?” he asks every so often. “Yes,” Remus says, after a moment; he remembers the names and the ingredients in the same way he memorises potions, and dance steps, and the neat, even stitching on his robe-hems when he has to mend them. So when he’s asked, later, to sort through the flavours, tell Sirius which ones have nuts and which ones are milk-free and which ones will turn your eyebrows purple, the answers come quick and correct. “Not bad,” Sirius says, smiling a little in that proud way he sometimes does, and then Remus is shunted behind the counter, given gloves, and now it’s on to actually scooping the ice cream. “Like this,” Sirius says, and produces a scoop so quickly done and beautifully rounded that Remus thinks Michelangelo would have cried over it. Remus’ first attempt takes three tries to get in the cup, and looks like a heap of shit. “Some flavours are easier to scoop than others,” Sirius assures him. He’s surprisingly undickish about it. “Try again.” So he does, again, and again, and again, with Sirius hemming and hawing over it outside the glass partition until his wrist complains and the bell above the shop door rings, and oh, shit it’s a customer.

Remus ducks out of the fridge and straightens up. He’s been hunched over the tubs of ice cream so long that blocks of colour burn their inverse in his vision, even after he tries to blink them out. “Welcome to Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour,” he says.

A hassled-looking woman and a young girl give him a matching set of odd looks as they make their way to the counter. Remus realises he’s still holding the scoop up, and that might be giving the wrong impression (aggressive, slightly unhinged). He lowers it.

Sirius nudges Remus aside with his hip. “Watch and learn,” he mutters, and then switches on the patented Sirius Black charm. “Hi,” he grins. “How can I help you?”

The girl is entranced by the flavours. Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum Bop is currently moving in the tub; dancing figures rise and fall in the sea of pink. “Mum, look,” she says urgently.

“D’you have ice cream sundaes here?” the woman asks; she’s eyeing the Blowing Gum Bop nervously, as if it’ll launch itself out of the glass.

“Oh, of course,” Sirius says. With the charm it sounds warm and conspiratorial, not douchey. “I suppose you’ll want something a little more,” and he looks at the Blowing Gum Bop, which is currently waving at the girl while dancing to some invisible song, “regular.”

“That’d be lovely,” the woman says, relieved.

It takes a while, and involves Sirius initially suggesting flavour combinations that sound like violations of the Geneva Convention, but the pair of them order one vanilla sundae with hot fudge, almond shavings, and crushed raspberry. Remus watches the way his hands move as he builds it, this towering thing of cold and sticky, sugary warmth. He slides his creation across the till to the woman and her delighted offspring, and sticks two tiny silver spoons and an extra raspberry on top.

“Eight sickles,” Sirius says, then drops the customer service smile, turns to Remus, and says, “Moony, watch.”

It’s a funny thing, and Remus would never admit it out loud, but it’s a wonder to see Sirius’ easy charm and competence here. His movements are fluid and graceful and his smile is bright. It does something to Remus: tugs his heart, keeps his eyes locked as Sirius’ hands dance over the cash register’s buttons and the jaw of the coin-eating thing pops open and shut, quick and functional, and Sirius hands over the small change.

“Thanks, love,” says the woman. She takes her daughter in one hand and the sundae in the other, and they walk out the glass doors to sit in the shade of one of the dark green umbrellas.

“See?” Sirius says, watching them. He turns to grin at Remus. “Easy.”

It is not easy. Remus finds himself freezing up and stuttering at the next customer, and knocking the glass slider into the ice cream case as he’s trying to scoop some Orange Explosion for a bemused family of five. “I am so sorry,” he whispers to Sirius that time. “We’ve all been there,” Sirius says, but he covers the next couple of customers.

And the day moves on; it moves strangely, in fits and starts. Five minutes drag on for at least an hour, and then two hours pass without so much as a wave at Remus. There’s a stolen chunk of one half-hour lunch break that Remus’ internal clock tells him must have been forty-five minutes minimum, as he pushes up from the corner table and sweeps up his sandwich crumbs. Sirius is at the till, scooping and chatting up the customers, giving Remus the occasional smile. Then Remus is back, apron on, time presumably passing as it always has. It’s something about those windows, Remus decides, the way light comes through them all warped and lands on the floor and tables all spiralled into tie-dye-like splotches. The way the clouds and buildings outside twist and flicker; the way the sun’s in two places at once. Sirius notices Remus staring and smiles. “Florean got this space so cheap cos he stretched it out a bit,” he says. “Like my— like Grimmauld Place.”

Sirius had been itching to leave for months, if not years. And it had happened, finally, but apparently his mouth is having trouble catching up. There’s the spasm of emotion across his face, and then nothing, just a furrowed brow and a faraway look. Transitions are strange things, an awkward push-pull between who-I-was-once and who-I-am-now, the latter being infinitely more nebulous and painful. Remus rushes to fill the silence and nudge Sirius back into where he is now. “How’s the new place?”

“New— oh, Alphard’s? Surprisingly clean.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Not very bachelor at all,” Sirius says, with a wry sort of smile. “Kreacher’s worse, though.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “That bar was not set high.”

“It was not,” Sirius agrees. “Remember when—” 

“The knickers incident, or the snogging a portrait?”

“Both.” Sirius shudders. “Merlin, but it’s good being out. I can go places. I can do things.”

“You sneaked out and went places and did things before,” Remus points out.

“Well, yes, but this is different. That old bat doesn’t scream at me anymore. Instead it’s Alphard. And he’s the one recommending places. You know, there’s this old record shop some ways off of here. It’s bloody brilliant. They’ve got your classic wizard rock, yeah, but they’ve got Muggle stuff too, and all these weird jangly punk half-blood bands and it’s fantastic. Fucking beautiful, it is.”

Remus just listens to Sirius go on for a bit about the shop; the people inside wearing dragon skin and these huge chunky boots, so much metal in their faces Sirius just wants to see how many magnets he could stick on them, and the music: loud and bright and furious in the front and, if you dig around the back, some slower, sweeter ones, which he thinks Remus would like (though privately Remus wants to try both); and they have this great thing where if you touch the record, just a finger, the music sort of flows up you and plays in your head, and it’s really amazing… the guy that runs that place, an absolute legend…

And it’s one of those strange afternoon moments where you’re watching someone talk and you notice their face, and the curve of their mouth, and the soft sharp shadows their eyelashes cast on their face, and their smile, and the liquid darkness of their hair, and the clear grey light of their eyes. And Remus— behind the counter, under the lights, spoons glinting around him, air cold and sweet— can’t stop looking. He smiles. He can’t help either one.

“What were we talking about?” Sirius says suddenly.

“I don’t know,” says Remus, dizzily, and casts back. “Closing up. You were teaching me.”

“Oh, you’ll have to un-stretch the space,” Sirius says. “I’ll show you.”

The day drags on and takes the sun with it over the horizon, and it bleeds a fiery, incredible light as it goes. The sunset’s made more remarkable through the strange windows. And then it is evening, blue and deep and kind of odd, being inside this well-lit bright shop with the sparkling spoons and his best friend, and then it is night.

There’s a lot of washing, and drying, and putting carefully in place, and laying paper over the ice-cream boxes, and switching off, and wiping and turning chairs upside down and folding things. Florean handles most of it with his wand, with movements that look like a dance practiced often. There’s some flourishing, which Sirius smirks at; Remus, in turn, internally rolls his eyes at that smirk. And then Florean turns to Remus, and says, gravely, “Remus.”

“Yes,” says Remus, slightly bemused.

“Good job today.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll have to be quicker,” Florean says. “Think on your feet a tad more.” Sirius shakes his head reproachfully from behind Florean, and Remus resists the urge to hex him. “But don’t worry,” Florean continues. “You’ll get there, I know you will. It takes a while. You did better than Sirius here did on his first day, didn’t he, Sirius?”

Now Remus smiles as Sirius splutters. Florean wisely ignores the splutter, and moves over to the door. “Close up behind me, won’t you?” he says to Sirius, who says, “That’s some cheek,” and Florean says, “What?”, and Sirius says, “After you slighted me the way you did, right in front of Remus—” and Florean says, “Go home, you,” and that is that.

It’s dark outside, and the air has a bit of a bite to it. The streetlamps spill buttery beams of light over the cobblestones. Laughter floats over from the Leaky Cauldron. Remus thinks of the crowds and sticky floors he’ll have to walk through to get out, and sighs.

“You alright?” Sirius asks.

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t half bad today.”

“Not too quick, though,” Remus says dryly.

“Neither was I, my first day,” Sirius says. Remus raises an eyebrow. “Fine, alright, I was quick, but I was maybe a bit too quick, if you catch my drift.”

Remus does not smile. “I don’t think I do.”

“There may have been a mishap or two with the scooping.”

“You’ll have to elaborate.”

“I hate you.”

Remus waits.

“I was trying to impress some bird and ended up flinging a scoop of Explosion into Bop, if you must know,” Sirius says with dignity. “And it lived up to its name.”

“Sirius.”

“It exploded, alright? And all those little dancing Drooble people were screaming and running for cover and there was such a mess on the slider, Remus, you wouldn’t believe--”

“What did the bird say?”

“She laughed at me.”

Remus is laughing too, out loud, and Sirius looks up; Remus mostly laughs silently, so he doesn’t blame him for the surprise on his face. “It’s not that funny,” Sirius says.

“Oh, yes it is.”

Even through the tears in his eyes Remus can see Sirius’ twitching half-smile down at his boots. “Fine,” Sirius says.

And it’s nice, the two of them, almost alone in front of the dark shop. Remus thinks, this is how it’s going to be. A whole summer full up of Sirius: his wit, his hair; sharp, scornful Sirius, and a softer, more thoughtful Sirius if he’s lucky; and Sirius who laughs, and Sirius who chews and talks, and Sirius who flirts with anything that moves and breathes. He’s struck dizzy with the thought of it, filled with a strange, terrifying elation, and his laughter rolls to a coughing halt.

“You alright?” Sirius asks again, and Remus says, again, “Yeah.”

It’s quiet for a moment. The elation mellows into something warm, comfortable, equally terrifying. It is just the two of them, and Sirius is eyeing him with something Remus can’t quite name.

“The folding,” Remus says, quieter, so as to not disturb the air around them. “Show me?”

And Sirius does.

**Author's Note:**

> this chapter is sort of a test run. if you liked it, let me know. in this house we appreciate comments and kudos!  
find me on tumblr [here](https://transitory-yes.tumblr.com)


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